“At five foot seven inches, she was taller than most of the other Asian girls at the school, and pretty but plain,” friend Karen Ho later wrote. “She rarely wore makeup; she had small, round wire-frame glasses that were neither stylish nor expensive.” She was not overly fashion-conscious along with many others in the late 1990s. Jennifer wore her long jet-black hair in a variety of braids and ponytails. In social situations she maintained her composure with constant eye contact, an unassuming and overtly friendly person, and what Karen called her trademark “high-pitched laugh.” Ho further remarked on Jennifer’s intensity, which shaped so many of her relationships, pursuits, and interactions throughout her life. “In conversation,” Ho wrote, “she always seemed focused on the moment — if you had her attention, you had it completely.”
Another friend, who simply identifies himself as J.B., tells me that while many girls at the school manipulated their Catholic uniforms in provocative ways, rolling up the skirts at the waist and unbuttoning their dress shirts, Jennifer preferred bulky sweaters and black pants. The former piano player, who first met Jennifer at age twelve, describes the school as very multicultural with a large contingent of Asians, who made up roughly 60 percent of the school, meshing with Italians, Indians, and African Canadians, who made up the other 40 percent. “There was no segregation; none whatsoever,” J.B. says, explaining how that culture at the time stood in stark contrast with another nearby high school.
Like many grade nine students, Jennifer found it difficult to make close friends right away. But she was spared having to eat her lunch alone because of her constant companion — music. It was the band that provided her with the trusted inner social circle she had always longed for. And it was in this inclusive environment where she was immediately surrounded with students of similar upbringing, most of them from Asian backgrounds. She played the flute. The band room became her hangout, a place where she could be at ease and be the person she had always imagined herself as — someone who was happy and friendly. And while she was secretly tormented with feelings of self-doubt and insecurity, she tried to foster a breezier side with which everyone would enjoy interacting.
The school was a place where “geekiness was celebrated,” as Karen put it, an environment where Jennifer found her niche and felt the acceptance she said she didn’t experience at home. Jennifer’s network of friends always remained limited, but it did expand outside band to a certain degree when she met two of her closest friends, Topaz Chiu and Adrian Tymkewycz, in French class. “We became a clique; a little group of friends,” she later remarked, smiling as she reminisced. Topaz was one of her few female friends and eventually grew so close to Jennifer, that they called each other sisters. However, Jennifer always said she was more drawn to males, preferring their easygoing nature to what she saw as girls’ “cattiness.”
If even the most mundane high schools can be liberating experience for teenagers, then Mary Ward was a revelation for Jennifer. It wasn’t just her new social circle that she found liberating, but also the school’s novel approach to education. Dubbed the “self-directed learning” format, the program provided students with the opportunity to choose their own schedule. Each course had eighteen units and, once complete — whether in one or six months — the extra time could be used to focus on weaker subjects. However, on any given day, former students said staff found so many kids loafing around doing nothing that the school was forced to hire hall monitors to patrol the corridors. “It became a real problem because everyone was just hanging around,” J.B. says, explaining that was why both he and Jennifer hung out in the band room where they always appeared to be focused on music. The problem many faced with all that autonomy, including Jennifer — raised under a strict regime — was that all the liberties came at a high price.
Hann, secure in Jennifer’s foundation, had eased up on her somewhat. Now, he was spending much of his time focusing on Felix, who had switched schools due to his poor grades. However, Jennifer’s piano and figure skating were still being pursued intently. She might have experienced unbridled freedom at school, but from the time Hann picked her up each day, sharply at 3:00 p.m., she was back on schedule. “My father picked me up right after school,” she said. “I would be going to either piano classes, skating classes, going home quickly to pick up my gear … or having a quick dinner before I commenced those other things. So I was pretty scheduled.”
Jennifer said she wanted to try out for school sports like the track team but wasn’t allowed to, and had no time. It was under this regimen that Jennifer reached a proficiency level in piano that Ewa Krajewska, her teacher of almost twenty years, says she has only seen a handful of times since she began working with students more than forty years ago. It wasn’t only her teacher who saw her potential. Other students at the conservatory looked up to Jennifer and aspired to one day play like her, although few achieved that dizzying height of success. J.B. describes her as one of the top students at Scarborough’s New Conservatory of Music; indeed a number of pictures of Jennifer clutching trophies, all dolled up in her Sunday best, still hang in the school. “She was very talented,” says J.B., who was a few years younger than Jennifer. “She was always winning first prize. Music was my main focus back then. At fourteen she was the best student in her class, playing Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu. It was impressive that she could play that at that time. I still play [piano] and I can’t even play it now. It’s very hard on your fingers and you need a lot of stamina.”
Ewa says Jennifer had rare talent and was willing to practise two hours a night to achieve her goals. “She had a good memory, and it was very easy for her to prepare,” she says, explaining she taught Jennifer from age six to age twenty-four. “She really wanted it, she loved the piano. It was her passion. Her father or mother would always come with her and wait in the lobby. Her parents may have been pushing her. She wanted to play in all the festivals. Parents used to push their kids a lot; now, not so much. [Jennifer] also volunteered at the festivals and helped students. She was very bright, smart, and so nice. She could have been a concert pianist.” Talking to me, Ewa points to a bust of Mozart sitting with pride of place on top of her piano. “She brought me this from Austria. We had a special bond.”
Jennifer continued playing piano throughout her teen years and into her twenties, getting not only immense pleasure from it, but tangible results. The late nights spent slaving over her school work so she could score nineties, however, fell by the wayside. By this point, Jennifer had realized there were more important things in life than trying to be Little Miss Perfect. Instead, she began to spend more time on the phone with friends. Hann and Bich were happy to cut her slightly more slack — but where Hann gave an inch, Jennifer took a mile. Midway through grade nine, Jennifer found herself scoring a mid-seventy average, boosted by two exceptions: music and math, both of which she was handily acing. But this might have been because of an accrued proficiency rather than hard work. “In high school, I kind of gave up,” she said. “I didn’t try as hard anymore. [My marks were] average. There were some courses I excelled in, such as music — one of my passions — and math. Other ones, not so much. So I would just say [I was scoring] average. I had ninety marks for music, but for science and for some of my later math courses and history, I was [around] a seventy.”
Faced with the dilemma of what to do next, Jennifer cowered at the prospect of showing her parents the level to which her marks had dropped. Telling the truth and handing over the real report card, which represented a drop of 20 percent in most of her subjects, she felt would have caused an explosion of anger. She might also see the life she’d been settling into reworked, filling any spare time she had with tutors and more expectations. The other alternative — deception — proved far more appealing. Jennifer implied that her decision could be traced back to her childhood and her traditional upbringing, which involved a strict code regarding which personal and family-related details she was allowed to share with the rest of
the world: “What happens in the family stays in the family.” Jennifer said that it was in this environment as a young girl that she developed a proficiency for recounting “white lies.”
Felix also remarks on the phenomenon, explaining that his family never wanted people to view them as lesser than they really were, and when there was a family secret, everyone was expected to shelter it from the outside world. Projecting the right image was very important not only to Hann but also to Bich, and the children knew this. Despite any turmoil at home or any sadness Jennifer felt inside, she always hid those emotions, wearing what she referred to as her “happy mask” in public.
It was this first deception, though, that led Jennifer to forgo her last refuge, her family, and begin using that same “happy mask” in the presence of her parents and extended family. Instead of facing up to the consequences of her tumbling grades, she decided to show her parents the image they’d deem acceptable. This was in order to maintain the status quo, which was more manageable than the truth. Her rationalization was simple. At the time, Jennifer saw a forged report card not as a life-altering fraud, but rather as a chance to buy some time so that she could pick up her grades in the upcoming semester. Armed with the knowledge that many Canadian students learn soon after beginning high school — universities only consider your two final years when deciding on acceptance — she thought she would have plenty of time to pick up her marks. With some old report cards in one hand, and her arts and crafts set in the other, the fourteen-year-old forged her first report card with the help of a photocopier. “That was one of my first lies,” she said. “I had faked it, because [on] my first report card, some of my marks were not what I would have had in elementary school. They were not A’s they were not A+, they were in the seventies, low seventies, and some of them were high, but the part where it says whether you have been trying hard in school or whether you participate in class, it was satisfactory.”
That evening, Jennifer walked into her father’s study and handed him the manipulated document. Her palms were sweating and her stomach did flips as he scanned it up and down. When he finally looked up and smiled, she realized, to her surprise, that her shrewd but amateur manipulation had worked: her father had bought it. Not only was she in the clear, but she later remarked how, at that moment, the tactic of deceit in return for peace became reinforced in her mind. “He was still himself. He was still happy. He didn’t notice anything different in my demeanour,” she said. “He was actually trying to push me harder in skating because, at that point, skating was the weaker of school, piano, and other things he looked highly upon. So, I did feel really guilty, but at the same time I rationalized it with myself and felt that maybe one or two report cards wasn’t so bad…. My friends had marks that were the same.”
It wasn’t only peace at home Jennifer was after. Bogus report cards also allowed her to shrug off her emerging sense of insecurity regarding her abilities, namely, that she was “not as smart as everyone thought.” While her excellence in elementary school, piano, and skating might have proved her abilities to others, high school brought with it plenty of more competition, and achievement wasn’t as easy to come by. She swept her self-doubt under the carpet, meaning she’d never have to try hard and fail at school again, leaving the tenuous confidence she clung to intact. And while she did feel shame, she said a greater worry was the rippling repercussions that would have resulted if she had shared the truth. “I didn’t want to disappoint my family,” she said. “I didn’t want my parents to feel ashamed of me…. I hid most of my feelings from them so they didn’t know how I felt about not being able to excel, so I forged my first report card.”
However, Jennifer said this feeling came largely from Hann, as opposed to Bich, who she said was more sympathetic to her plight. “My mother was very different,” she said. “All she wanted was for me to do the best that I could. She would take me aside sometimes, she could read me, she was almost like I was another her. So she knew something was up, and she knew I was putting pressure on myself … because I was still skating and still had piano at this time. And she knew my passion for those two, and when I didn’t win competitions, she saw how disappointed I was. And sometimes, when my father wasn’t around, she’d console me, especially during the nighttimes, when I would let my emotions out by myself. And she’d say, ‘You know all we want for you is just your best. Just do what you can.’ Lying to my mom was heartbreaking, and I felt so disgusted with myself.”
Deception is nothing new to Western youth, especially when it concerns lying to parents. However, engineering this sort of deception might be unthinkable to Western teenagers, possibly because the perceived consequences of failure aren’t severe enough to drive them to perpetrate this depth of trickery. But for Jennifer, and many others in similar circumstances, fooling your parents into believing you’re doing one thing while really doing another is not only considered but often acted upon. For many Western children, bringing home grades in the seventies is acceptable, although many parents might work with children or seek help for them in order to improve grades. For others, it might be considered a job well done. In the Pan family, anything under an A was unacceptable. After all, her parents knew she could do better — anything less than a top grade was construed as simple laziness. While someone in her predicament — falsifying report cards — might add in a few A- or even B+ grades to help make the document appear genuine, not Jennifer. Her report cards contained A and A+ grades almost exclusively. “I thought that’s what was expected of me,” she said.
“Tiger Mom” Amy Chua phrases it like this: “If a Chinese child gets a B — which would never happen — there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A. Chinese parents demand perfection…. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.”
There is a well-worn joke in Canadian high schools in which a North American grading system is juxtaposed next to an “Asian grading system.” Normal system: A = Great, B = Good, C = Average, D = Bad, F = Fail. The Asian system: A = Average, B = Bad, C = Catastrophe, D = Disowned, F = Forgotten Forever. Whether real or imagined, this explanation by Amy might provide a window into Jennifer’s mindset about the possible consequences of receiving poor grades.
It is this sort of pressure that prompts dishonesty, according to some researchers. For many children, especially girls, the easiest alternative is to pretend. Researcher and journalist Julie Park, who was raised in a strict Korean household, writes that this sort of behaviour enjoys a “long and cherished tradition within the [Asian] community. The most resourceful children know there are many shades of acceptable pretense. It is simple enough, for example, to put on a show of obedience in the presence of one’s parents, and then turn around and do whatever the hell one pleases as soon as they are out of sight. Some families have a kind of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Or one can simply lie. What may appear as ‘Asian’ hypocrisy and sneakiness from the outside is often the only solution to a desperate situation: parents are appeased; children get some breathing room; harmony reigns; everyone wins. All it takes is a little creativity.”
The reality was that Jennifer wasn’t doing “whatever the hell” she wanted, though. She was, by all accounts, a well-behaved and well-mannered girl putting in an average effort at school. A friend of Jennifer’s at the time told Karen Ho that for Jennifer, living under her parents’ rules was like “tyranny.” “They were absolutely controlling,” Karen wrote. “They treated her like shit for such a long time.”
Jennifer’s story garnered widespread attention from Asians all around the world, many of whom empathized with her home life. And while many Westerners might have expressed shock at her forgeries, countless commentators declared understanding, writing about how lies had shaped their youth. “I forged m
y dad’s signature when I got an unacceptably poor grade on a test in Chinese school: eighty percent. I was nine,” one Web commentator wrote. “I got caught and it wasn’t pretty. Also, I seriously considered some pretty morbid stuff because I was put on academic probation at [the] University of Toronto. I ended up dropping out in shame.”
Similar stories were replicated in comments from a multitude of Asian countries. The reality is that young people learn how to lie in their own homes, directly from their parents, researchers say, but have a variety of reasons for exercising the ability to deceive. “Children are quick to learn that lying can be useful when trying to avoid punishment, create a better image, influence others’ behaviour, or form their own identity,” one website, Truthaboutdeception.com, dedicated to the phenomenon of deception, states. “Children with higher IQs who are more socially outgoing, or who are raised in a controlling family environment, are more likely to use deception. Unfortunately, deceptive behaviour tends to increase over time, especially during the teenage years, when children are trying to assert their independence. And to make matters more complicated, teenagers tend to put rewards ahead of risks, causing them to act more carelessly [and often more deceptively] than parents would like.”
One might argue that, while Jennifer started lying to “avoid punishment,” that wish morphed over time until it grew into a means to “form her own identity.” Dr. Helen Hsu, who also works as clinical supervisor for youth and family services at the City of Freemont in San Francisco, says she hears countless stories in her line of work about this sort of behaviour, whether that be lying about report cards or switching majors in university and never telling parents. But, she adds, that it goes far beyond lying about academics, often extending into people’s personal lives. Dating in many restrictive Asian households is strictly prohibited until children are out of university or get jobs. While some choose to obey, whether by choice or otherwise, others choose to lead double lives. “Until my husband and I started dating, he never told [his parents] about the girls in his life,” she says. “He led a normal life, but didn’t tell them. The thinking goes ‘I am not making them worry, but I can still lead my life.’” She adds that the ironic part of this sort of behaviour is that later in life, many Asian families will remark to their offspring “Why aren’t you married?”
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